About Grinnell's Tutorial

Grinnell's Tutorial serves as a linchpin of your Grinnell education. While there are many purposes to the Tutorial, they all relate to a simple purpose: The Tutorial helps guide you on your path as lifelong learner. To be a successful learner and thinker, you must develop a number of requisite skills. In particular, you should be able to

• read critically and analyze what you have read;
• formulate useful and interesting questions, based on ideas you encounter;
• develop coherent and compelling arguments, in both written and oral form;
• find and identify appropriate evidence when conducting research and developing arguments.

You must also understand a number of related issues, particularly

• the purpose and components of a successful liberal arts education and
• the concept intellectual property and its effect on your academic endeavors and your role as a citizen.

Former Associate Dean Helen Scott, who coordinated Tutorial for most of my first six years at Grinnell, regularly reminded Tutorial faculty that all of these skills are interconnected. For example, you cannot really discuss a topic unless you have critically read the underlying materials and you will be able to read more critically after discussing material with colleagues. Similarly, you cannot write an essay unless you formulate a strong thesis, you cannot form that thesis without critical reading of the underlying material, and you will find that attempting to write carefully about a topic not only improves your understanding for future readings, it also helps improve your thesis. Of course, Professor Scott phrases these interrelationships much more clearly than I do. (H. Scott. Personal Communcations. 1997-2003.)

The advent of new technologies, such as large-scale hypertext systems including the World-Wide Web, has not significantly changed the needs for such skills. However, the applications of these skills have expanded. For example, some claim that modern thinkers now need to be able to develop arguments not only in linear written form and oral form, but also in new hypertextual forms. Similarly, you need to be able to analyze hypertexts.

Tutorial also has a second important purpose: The Tutorial creates the relationship between students and their first advisor. While we expect that you will form many close relationships with your faculty, Grinnell feels that it is particularly important that you form such a relationship as early as possible.

Tutorial, like many classes at Grinnell, also gives you the opportunity to study a topic in depth with a small cohort. In this Tutorial, we will emphasize the topic by permitting you to choose subtopics and lead portions of the Tutorial on those subtopics.